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SUMMARY:MEA Auction Preview
DESCRIPTION:Community GalleryJune 25 – July 11\, 2026 \n\n\n\nOpening Reception: June 25 from 6 to 8 pm \n\n\n\nThe MEA Auction Preview offers a first look at the full collection of artworks generously donated by local and regional artists in support of the Vernon Public Art Gallery’s annual MEA fundraising auction. \n\n\n\nInstalled in the gallery throughout the month leading up to the event\, this exhibition invites visitors to experience the artworks in person\, explore a wide range of creative practices\, and learn more about the participating artists. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or a first-time bidder\, the preview provides the perfect opportunity to plan your bids in advance and support the arts in your community. \n\n\n\nDon’t miss this chance to discover new artists\, connect with the gallery\, and help ensure the continued success of one of VPAG’s most important fundraising events of the year!
URL:https://vernonpublicartgallery.com/event/mea-auction-preview
CATEGORIES:2026,Exhibitions
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SUMMARY:Opera Obscura
DESCRIPTION:Mary Kavanagh\n\n\n\nTopham Brown GalleryAugust 7 – October 7\, 2026 \n\n\n\nOpening Reception: August 6\, 2026\, from 6 to 8 pmArtist Talk: August 8\, 2026\, from 1 to 2 pm \n\n\n\nOpera Obscura ¹ is a large-scale installation by Canadian artist Mary Kavanagh. For three decades\, Kavanagh has investigated sites shaped by nuclear colonialism\, militarization\, and industrial extraction\, tracing how histories are materially inscribed in land\, atmosphere\, and built environments. In this new work\, she turns her attention to one of the defining institutions of civic life: the library. \n\n\n\nAt the exhibition’s centre are approximately 2\,000 deaccessioned books sourced from the annual collection review of the University of Lethbridge Library. Spanning disciplines\, languages\, and eras\, each volume has been individually hand-inked and arranged in a dense gridded field. Serial and austere\, the installation evokes both catalogue and cenotaph. Gilded titles\, embossed surfaces\, library markings\, and traces of use remain partially visible beneath layers of ink. A tension between erasure and preservation extends through a companion series of black-on-black photographs in which individual volumes are isolated\, lit\, and slowly disclosed. \n\n\n\nThe project investigates the library as both repository and site of cultural negotiation — an institution through which knowledge is ordered\, preserved\, overwritten\, or erased. Walter Benjamin describes the “collector’s bind”: that books do not belong to us as much as we belong to them\, each inhabited by the other. ² Blackening becomes a labour of witnessing\, an act of examining the histories sedimented within each book; Opera Obscura gives loss a body and articulates its weight. The work confronts incremental transformations shaping public institutions — technological change\, economic pressures\, and shifting political priorities — that quietly alter the conditions through which knowledge circulates. As Hannah Arendt suggests\, attention is itself a civic act. ³ \n\n\n\nMonumental in scale and elegiac in tone\, the project registers the slow erosion of the material record\, the institutions entrusted with its keeping\, and the accelerating forces that now threaten both. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n¹ Opera — the plural of the Latin opus (work\, labour\, effort) — suggests not a single work but a body of works\, the product of sustained human toil.   Obscura — from obscurus (dark\, hidden\, withdrawn) — names both a material condition and a state of disappearance. \n\n\n\n² Walter Benjamin\, “Unpacking My Library” (1931) in Illuminations (English edition\, 1969). \n\n\n\n³ Hannah Arendt\, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt\, Brace & World\, 1968). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout the Artist \n\n\n\nMary Kavanagh is a Professor of Art and Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge. Her projects are developed through fieldwork\, residencies\, military embeds\, and interdisciplinary collaboration across Canada\, the United States\, Australia\, and Europe. Kavanagh is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. www.marykavanagh.ca \n\n\n\n\n\n\n			\n				\n			\n		Black Book Study 01a | Agrippa von Nettesheim\, Heinrich Cornelius. Opera\, Volumes I–II (Lyon: per Beringos fratres\, c. 1580; facsimile reprint\, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag\, 1970).\n\n\n\n\n\n\n			\n				\n			\n		Black Book Study 01b | Agrippa von Nettesheim\, Heinrich Cornelius. Opera\, Volumes I–II (Lyon: per Beringos fratres\, c. 1580; facsimile reprint\, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag\, 1970).
URL:https://vernonpublicartgallery.com/event/opera-obscura
CATEGORIES:2026,Exhibitions
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